Stargate Command: Our First Impressions

OPINION: MGM's new digital home for the Stargate franchise has a little something for everyone.

Today I got a sneak peek atStargate Command, MGM’s new digital platform that will serve as Stargate’s new official online home. The service offers free content and a paid subscription service, and opens for business Wednesday, September 20.

I’ll leave it to you to explore the site after its official launch, but in the meantime I do want to share some first impressions for those eager for the next evolution of Stargate online.

Articles, photos, quizzes … the site is full of them. There is a critical mass of content ready for launch, with a steady stream no doubt ready to follow in the days ahead. Post comments, share a video — all the bells and whistles we have come to expect from a well-made Web site. Since this is a site that also has a companion app, it’ll be easy to dip in and enjoy it in small bites while I’m on the go.

I can see myself popping in to read a quick article or look at production photos while waiting at the doctor’s office, or watching “Upgrades” during a longer train ride. (“We’ll need snacks!”)

Stargate Origins will be the “killer app,” that thing that makes Stargate Command a must. And there is SGO material here right from the get-go, including the first installment of the new “Director’s Diary” series from Mercedes Bryce Morgan. I love rewatching and celebrating the previous shows, but I’m the sort of fan who is going to park on the “Feed” page and keep hitting ‘Refresh’ until I see more about the new series.

While there are other places I can watch SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe (starting with my DVD collection) this is the only place for Origins.

Having every episode and film so easy to access will be icing on the cake: I love my Stargate SG-1 Complete Series boxed set, but honestly it’s been a while since I went through the effort of unfolding its elaborate packaging and waiting for a disc to load. In the digital age I’d rather stream something I can call up in seconds with my remote control, my phone, or a laptop.

I can cast this to my TV. While the video player doesn’t have that little “Cast” icon I’ve come to know and love since buying a Google Chromecast, users of the Chrome browser can still easily cast it as a Web site to the television. Once you are set up for casting, just right-click anywhere on the site and choose “Cast …”

Stargate Command is a labor of love. Some of the studio’s past efforts at creating an official online presence during the past two decades have felt somewhat sterile, products of a Vast Corporate Entity. This might be a vague and subjective thing to say, but Stargate Command feels more down-to-earth. It’s made by people who know and love Stargate, and they are really making efforts to get fans involved and put their fandom stories and their interests up front. (You’ll even see some familiar faces from GateWorld writing guest pieces from time to time.)

We’ve passed along to MGM some of your questions posted on Twitter, from app availability and device access to episode streaming quality. GateWorld will bring you those answers as soon as we have them.

Right now we can tell you that you’ll be able to view the site on the Web, and download the Stargate Command app on the Apple App Store (iOS) and Google Play (Android) beginning Wednesday (in select countries).

All-Access will be available to folks in the United States, the U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand starting tomorrow. But all of the site’s free content will still be accessible everywhere.

Although Stargate fans in other countries won’t be able to get all of what the studio is calling the platform’s “premium” content, Stargate Command does have something for everyone. If your love of Stargate focuses on one particular show or the entire universe, you’ll find lots of goodies here. (There’s also a handy way to filter the Feed by show.) And if you’re a long-time fan who thinks you’ve seen every photo and heard every anecdote, MGM is about to open the floodgates of the archives and show us things we’ve never seen.

New features, new stories — and new Stargate.

Stargate Command goes worldwide on Wednesday. After you’ve had a chance to check it out, come back here and tell us what you think! We’ll continue to provide full-coverage of the entire Stargate franchise here at GateWorld.

UPDATE: We continue our review here with post-launch analysis, including some hands-on testing of the site’s video streaming.

18 Responses

It’s gonna be pretty important to me and a lot of people that there be some kind of streaming app. Casting to a chrome box is great, but what about those of us with a well-loved Roku?
Thanks for the updates!
(Can’t believe I didn’t have an account before today! Visitor since 2005)

@Benjamin
Someone asked that a similar question, about it becoming available for Windows 10 and the answer from Stargate Command was “not at present”.

I installed the app on my phone (can’t do much more than that since I’m not eligible for exclusive membership). It certainly looks colorful (and is a freakin’ drain on my battery power). I’m not an app-user and don’t have many apps in general on my phone — I only have useful apps. I don’t even have games installed. This app classifies as a useless app (not to be interpreted as negative people).

I don’t do messaging/foruming through apps — my motor skills are at an all-time low and making long comments on a tiny screen with a keyboard that makes me miss every other letter is just not what I call fun. I need a physical keyboard with a large screen.

However, the content is for the most part accessible to all like the articles and the photos, and even the diary about Origins. Everything is clearly marked whether it’s all-access only, or free-for-all. And the commandcoins are for bragging rights (or so I’ve been told). You can earn em by logging in, doing quizzes and polls, and commenting/liking and generally be active.

Now, if only the website would contain the same content, I would gladly join and bring some Lemming-fun to the forum, but for now Gateworld is still definitely the place to be for a good discussion and/or gushing over favorite characters.

Definitely the former. Depending on their deployment strategy, the old has to die so the new can be born! Maybe something like a DNS switch (in which case it could take 24 hours to propagate worldwide).

I can’t believe you are promoting that train wreck of a cash grab. The site is designed for Apple mobile devices FIRST, Android Second, with web browsers as a third thought. Heck they couldn’t even hire an admin that knew what the they were doing and screwed the DNS which is mind boggling. (NOTE I am a sysadmin as well as running several webservers, I kinda know this stuff). There appears to be a server resource problem as it seems either the memcache or redis isn’t working properly or it could be the numerous calls on each page to outside domains and my god couldn’t they have found a better cdn than facebook?!? I can name 3 off the top of my head that are far superior. This thing is looking more and more like the SGW nightmare I figured it would be. Miss managed by amateurs and rushed to production just to get paid. The really horrible part is when it tanks, MGM won’t let anyone touch the Stargate property again for another 10 years and we the fans will be made to suffer.

So far, this has been a disaster. I have to even get my email saying I have All-Access. My wife gave it to me as a gift and she got an email saying it was purchased and our account his been charged the $20 with the promise I would get my log in information right away. That was last night and I have not gotten anything. On top of that, I do not even see an iOS app in the Apple store to be able to watch it. Have I missed that? I do a search online and find it in the Google Play Store. I am not going to buy something like that. Any one else having similar issues like this? So far I am not impressed and have actually asked for our money back, yet of course, they have not responded to either.

Being in IT I have been through allot of product launches and problems/glitches are not unheard of. To be honest this isn’t the worst launch I have seen.

MikeS,
It has been a month since I signed up. I registered an account using Facebook and it seems to be working ok for me. They never sent me an ID but as of right now all the All Access stuff seems to be working. Not sure if I gave them my facebook ID during the setup so they might be linking the account that way.

I signed up a while back and didn’t get a username/password sent to me. To access the site I put in my e-mail addy and used “forgot password” and they sent an email that let me actually setup a password lol.

Personally I think the site is pretty bad at the moment even if it wasn’t lagging/timing out all the time.
*The video player is very lacking in options compared to netflix/amazon/youtube etc…
*the forum is a big blocky crapfest instead of a real forum and it has no subforums so it won’t ever be anything worth actually using unless they change it.

I did however enjoy some of the trivia parts and the developer’s journal.

Honestly though none of it matters if they want $20 from me to start making more Stargate they could have just asked for a check without the site.

I know we should expect some issues on the first couple days after launch, but the website is practically unusable. 9 times out of 10, the browser times out or it fails to load either on the home page or navigating around the website. When it does load, it doesn’t log me in automatically, even though I told it I am ok with the cookies. Occasionally, pages load with all the elements stacked together, sometimes with videos playing randomly in that stack. the video player doesn’t work at full screen in firefox, and Edge is having even more trouble just loading the pages.

I finally managed to access the website, and it’s a freakin’ forum disappointment.

There is no forum — just a cluster of messages with comments and likes. No order, only chaos. In the app, the posts are randomly ordered with no sense of direction, but on the website it’s even worse. It looks like a Tumblr copy and I can honestly say that this is not the way for me.

So, I’ll probably stay for the articles, quizzes and polls, but as far as interacting goes with other fans — Gateworld *is* definitely THE PLACE to be!